thought I'd like to have a little fling on the billiards championship this
autumn.) I have the Infinite to keep in tune with," she waved her hand.
"And then there's the next world and all the spirits, and one's Aura, and
Mrs. Eddy and saying you're not ill, and the Christian Mysteries and Mrs.
Besant. It's all splendid. One's never dull for a moment. I can't think
how I used to get on before--in the Old Days. Pleasure--running about,
that's all it was; just running about. Lunch, tea, dinner, theatre, supper
every day. It was fun, of course, while it lasted. But there wasn't much
left of it afterwards. There's rather a good thing about that in BarbecueSmith's
new book. Where is it?"
She sat up and reached for a book that was lying on the little table by
the head of the sofa.
"Do you know him, by the way?" she asked.
"Who?"
"Mr. Barbecue-Smith."
Denis knew of him vaguely. Barbecue-Smith was a name in the
Sunday papers. He wrote about the Conduct of Life. He might even be
8
the author of "What a Young Girl Ought to Know".
"No, not personally," he said.
"I've invited him for next week-end." She turned over the pages of
the book. "Here's the passage I was thinking of. I marked it. I always
mark the things I like."
Holding the book almost at arm's length, for she was somewhat longsighted,
and making suitable gestures with her free hand, she began to read,
slowly, dramatically.
"'What are thousand pound fur coats, what are quarter million
incomes?'" She looked up from the page with a histrionic movement of
the head; her orange coiffure nodded portentously. Denis looked at it,
fascinated. Was it the Real Thing and henna, he wondered, or was it one
of those Complete Transformations one sees in the advertisements?
"'What are Thrones and Sceptres?'"
The orange Transformation--yes, it must be a Transformation-- bobbed
up again.
"'What are the gaieties of the Rich, the splendours of the Powerful,
what is the pride of the Great, what are the gaudy pleasures of High
Society?'"
The voice, which had risen in tone, questioningly, from sentence to
sentence, dropped suddenly and boomed reply.
"'They are nothing. Vanity, fluff, dandelion seed in the wind, thin
vapours of fever. The things that matter happen in the heart. Seen
things are sweet, but those unseen are a thousand times more significant.
It is the unseen that counts in Life.'"
Mrs. Wimbush lowered the book. "Beautiful, isn't it?" she said.
Denis preferred not to hazard an opinion, but uttered a non- committal
"H'm."
"Ah, it's a fine book this, a beautiful book," said Priscilla, as she let the
pages flick back, one by one, from under her thumb. "And here's the
passage about the Lotus Pool. He compares the Soul to a Lotus Pool,
you know." She held up the book again and read. "'A Friend of mine
has a Lotus Pool in his garden. It lies in a little dell embowered with
wild roses and eglantine, among which the nightingale pours forth its
9
amorous descant all the summer long. Within the pool the Lotuses
blossom, and the birds of the air come to drink and bathe themselves in its
crystal waters...' Ah, and that reminds me," Priscilla exclaimed, shutting
the book with a clap and uttering her big profound laugh--"that reminds
me of the things that have been going on in our bathing-pool since you
were here last. We gave the village people leave to come and bathe here
in the evenings. You've no idea of the things that happened."
She leaned forward, speaking in a confidential whisper; every now and
then she uttered a deep gurgle of laughter. "...mixed bathing...saw them
out of my window...sent for a pair of field- glasses to make sure...no doubt
of it..." The laughter broke out again. Denis laughed too. Barbecue-
Smith was tossed on the floor.
It's time we went to see if tea's ready," said Priscilla. She hoisted
herself up from the sofa and went swishing off across the room, striding
beneath the trailing silk. Denis followed her, faintly humming to
himself:
"That's why I'm going to Sing in op'ra, sing in op'ra, Sing in op-poppop-
pop-popera."
And then the little twiddly bit of accompaniment at the end: "ra-ra."
10
CHAPTER III.
The terrace in front of the house was a long narrow strip of turf,
bounded along its outer edge by a graceful stone balustrade. Two little
summer-houses of brick stood at either end. Below the house the ground
sloped very steeply away, and the terrace was a remarkably high one; from
the balusters to the sloping lawn beneath was a drop of thirty feet. Seen
from below, the high unbroken terrace wall, built like the house itself of
brick, had the almost menacing aspect of a fortification--a castle bastion,
from whose parapet one looked out across airy depths to distances level
with the eye. Below, in the foreground, hedged in by solid masses of
sculptured yew trees, lay the stone-brimmed swimming-pool. Beyond it
stretched the park, with its massive elms, its green expanses of grass, and,
at the bottom of the valley, the gleam of the narrow river. On the farther
side of the stream the land rose again in a long slope, chequered with
cultivation. Looking up the valley, to the right, one saw a line of blue,
far-off hills.
The tea-table had been planted in the shade of one of the little
summer-houses, and the rest of the party was already assembled about it
when Denis and Priscilla made their appearance. Henry Wimbush had
begun to pour out the tea. He was one of those ageless, unchanging men
on the farther side of fifty, who might be thirty, who might be anything.
Denis had known him almost as long as he could remember. In all those
years his pale, rather handsome face had never grown any older; it was
like the pale grey bowler hat which he always wore, winter and summer-unageing,
calm, serenely without expression.
Next him, but separated from him and from the rest of the world by the
almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness, sat Jenny Mullion. She was
perhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pink- and-white complexion, and
wore her brown hair plaited and coiled in two lateral buns over her ears.
In the secret tower of her deafness she sat apart, looking down at the world
through sharply piercing eyes. What did she think of men and women
and things? That was something that Denis had never been able to
discover. In her enigmatic remoteness Jenny was a little disquieting.
11
Even now some interior joke seemed to be amusing her, for she was
smiling to herself, and her brown eyes were like very bright round
marbles.
On his other side the serious, moonlike innocence of Mary
Bracegirdle's face shone pink and childish. She was nearly twenty-three,
but one wouldn't have guessed it. Her short hair, clipped like a page's,
hung in a bell of elastic gold about her cheeks. She had large blue china
eyes, whose expression was one of ingenuous and often puzzled
earnestness.
Next to Mary a small gaunt man was sitting, rigid and erect in his chair.
In appearance Mr. Scogan was like one of those extinct bird-lizards of the
Tertiary. His nose was beaked, his dark eye had the shining quickness of
a robin's. But there was nothing soft or gracious or feathery about him.
The skin of his wrinkled brown face had a dry and scaly look; his hands
were the hands of a crocodile. His movements were marked by the
lizard's disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed; his speech was thin, fluty,
and dry. Henry Wimbush's school-fellow and exact contemporary, Mr.
Scogan looked far older and, at the same time, far more youthfully alive
than did that gentle aristocrat with the face like a grey bowler.
Mr. Scogan might look like an extinct saurian, but Gombauld was
altogether and essentially human. In the old-fashioned natural histories
of the 'thirties he might have figured in a steel engraving as a type of
Homo Sapiens--an honour which at that time commonly fell to Lord
Byron. Indeed, with more hair and less collar, Gombauld would have
been completely Byronic--more than Byronic, even, for Gombauld was of
Provencal descent, a black- haired young corsair of thirty, with flashing
teeth and luminous large dark eyes. Denis looked at him enviously. He
was jealous of his talent: if only he wrote verse as well as Gombauld
painted pictures! Still more, at the moment, he envied Gombauld his
looks, his vitality, his easy confidence of manner. Was it surprising that
Anne should like him? Like him?--it might even be something worse,
Denis reflected bitterly, as he walked at Priscilla's side down the long
grass terrace.
Between Gombauld and Mr. Scogan a very much lowered deck-chair
12
presented its back to the new arrivals as they advanced towards the tea-
table. Gombauld was leaning over it; his face moved vivaciously; he
smiled, he laughed, he made quick gestures with his hands. From the
depths of the chair came up a sound of soft, lazy laughter. Denis started
as he heard it. That laughter--how well he knew it! What emotions it
evoked in him! He quickened his pace.
In her low deck-chair Anne was nearer to lying than to sitting. Her
long, slender body reposed in an attitude of listless and indolent grace.
Within its setting of light brown hair her face had a pretty regularity that
was almost doll-like. And indeed there were moments when she seemed
nothing more than a doll; when the oval face, with its long-lashed, pale
blue eyes, expressed nothing; when it was no more than a lazy mask of
wax. She was Henry Wimbush's own niece; that bowler-like
countenance was one of the Wimbush heirlooms; it ran in the family,
appearing in its female members as a blank doll-face. But across this
dollish mask, like a gay melody dancing over an unchanging fundamental
bass, passed Anne's other inheritance--quick laughter, light ironic
amusement, and the changing expressions of many moods. She was
smiling now as Denis looked down at her: her cat's smile, he called it,
for no very good reason. The mouth was compressed, and on either side
of it two tiny wrinkles had formed themselves in her cheeks. An infinity
of slightly malicious amusement lurked in those little folds, in the puckers
about the half-closed eyes, in the eyes themselves, bright and laughing
between the narrowed lids.
The preliminary greetings spoken, Denis found an empty chair
between Gombauld and Jenny and sat down.
"How are you, Jenny?" he shouted to her.
Jenny nodded and smiled in mysterious silence, as though the subject
of her health were a secret that could not be publicly divulged.
"How's London been since I went away?" Anne inquired from the
depth of her chair.
The moment had come; the tremendously amusing narrative was
waiting for utterance. "Well," said Denis, smiling happily, "to begin
with..."
13
"Has Priscilla told you of our great antiquarian find?" Henry
Wimbush leaned forward; the most promising of buds was nipped.
"To begin with," said Denis desperately, "there was the Ballet..."
"Last week," Mr. Wimbush went on softly and implacably, "we dug up
fifty yards of oaken drain-pipes; just tree trunks with a hole bored through
the middle. Very interesting indeed. Whether they were laid down by
the monks in the fifteenth century, or whether..."
Denis listened gloomily. "Extraordinary!" he said, when Mr.
Wimbush had finished; "quite extraordinary!" He helped himself to
another slice of cake. He didn't even want to tell his tale about London
now; he was damped.
For some time past Mary's grave blue eyes had been fixed upon him.
"What have you been writing lately?" she asked. It would be nice to
have a little literary conversation.
"Oh, verse and prose," said Denis--"just verse and prose."
"Prose?" Mr. Scogan pounced alarmingly on the word. "You've been
writing prose?"
"Yes."
"Not a novel?"
"Yes."
"My poor Denis!" exclaimed Mr. Scogan. "What about?"
Denis felt rather uncomfortable. "Oh, about the usual things, you
know."
"Of course," Mr. Scogan groaned. "I'll describe the plot for you.
Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever.
He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and
comes to London, where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down
with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon
his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles
delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the
luminous Future."
Denis blushed scarlet. Mr. Scogan had described the plan of his
novel with an accuracy that was appalling. He made an effort to laugh.
"You're entirely wrong," he said. "My novel is not in the least like that."
14
It was a heroic lie. Luckily, he reflected, only two chapters were written.
He would tear them up that very evening when he unpacked.
Mr. Scogan paid no attention to his denial, but went on: "Why will
you young men continue to write about things that are so entirely
uninteresting as the mentality of adolescents and artists? Professional
anthropologists might find it interesting to turn sometimes from the beliefs
of the Blackfellow to the philosophical preoccupations of the
undergraduate. But you can't expect an ordinary adult man, like myself,
to be much moved by the story of his spiritual troubles. And after all,
